Developmental Psych midterm 1

Queens University 251

Plato

Belived kids to be born with conceptual knowledge

Aristotle

Belived knowledge arises from experience

Rosseau

Belived in innate justice and morality

Locke

Belived in Tabula Rasa—Blank slate

Active child

Childrens choices help guide their development

Continuity and discontinuity

Growth may be smooth from one state transitioning into another or jagged and changing qualitativly at stages.

Sociocultural context

Time, place, SES, culture and beleifs, etc.

Individual differences

Differences in genetics, treatments, preferences, reactions.

Reliability

consistancy—are the results the same if tested differently

Validity

Accuracy—does it messure what it intends to

Interarer reliability

Do different raters classify the behavior the same way

Test-retest reliability

are the scores or classifications that children receive stable over tme

Internal validity

Can the effects measured be attributed to the variables the researcher intened to manipulate. Is DV a result of IV

External Validity

How wideley can findings be generalized outside the study

Replicability

Do other studies yeild same results.

Coreelational measures

The sign of the number indcates a positive or negative relationship while the number from 0-1 indicates the strength of relationship.

Microgenetic

Many mesurements taken over a short period

Cross sectional

Measuring and contrasting kids of different ages

Cross sectional/sequential

Compare “cohorts“ (same age at different time) as well as “sections“ same time different age

Three policy statements in ethics

Respect for persons

Concern for welfare

Justice

Preformationism

Ideaa that beings just need to grow from the unfolding tiny form/homunculous

Zygote

Conception-2 weeks: Lasts until implanted in uterine wall. rapid cell division takes place

Embryo

3rd week-8th week: major development of organs and systems. cell division, migration, differentiation and cell death

Fetus

9th week-birth: continued development and rabid body growth. Increasing behavior, sensory experience and learning.

Cell differentiation

Stem cells are assigned a purpose dependant on location and genes

Ectoderm

In embryos, developing nervous system, nails, teeth, inner ear, eye lens and epidermis

Mesoderm

muscles, bones, circulatory system, skin

Endoderm

digestive system, lungs, urinary tract and glands

Cephalocaudal

head to tail development

Proximodistal

inside to outside development

Teratogens

Anything with potential to harm fetus

Sensitive periods

Times in development where growth is occuring and therefore harmfull practice is more likely to effect development. UNlikely to occur prior to 2 weeks.

Experience expectant processes

The brain expects to receive certain input to develop eg. sense. If experience doesnt occur, it gets taken up by other senses

Experience dependant processes

Certain things hwich tend to differ from person to person like learning, idiosyncracies and environmental effects.

Piagetian Theory

Kids grow in discontinuous stages. They are intresnically motivated to learn and dirrect their own learning.

Constructivist theory

Active child dirrects their own learning by interest, attention and active engagement in new information.

Adaptation

Response to environment

Assimilation

Intergration of new information into existing schemas

Accomodations

Changed to prexistsing schemas with the reveal of new information

Equilibriation

Balance of assimilartion and accomadation.

Equilibriaum

no descrepency between experience and understanding

Disequalibrium

Discrerpencyunderstood leading to better understainding

Pagetian process

cycle Assimilation—> cognitive disequilibrium —> Accomidation —> cognitive equilibrium.

Basic reflexes

Piagets stage where kids use reflexes to expolre and learn about the world. Acoomidation of sucking reflex 0-1 months

Primary circular

piagets stage where kids build on reflexes and unintentional events 1-4 m

secondary circular

piagets stage: increasing interest in objects, lack of object perminantce 4-8 months

Intentional Behvaior

8-12 months. A not B error

Tertiary Circular

12-18 months. Old actions with new objects. Active exploration.

Using Symbols

18-24 monthsw: begining of symbolic representation. First deffered immitation.

A not B error

Child searching for A while looking at B. Motor movements misaligned with knowledge.

Information Processing Theories

Idea of mind as a computational system. Cognition involves all menta; activity. Thinkng is a process that occurs over time. Developent occurs as making cognitive process more effectient. Continous model.

Working memory

increases grately from infancy to adulthood. Holding and manipulating information

Executive functioning

located in frontal lobe. Inhibition, enhancement of working memory and cognitive flexibility.

Overlapping Waves Theory

Children solve problems with various strategys depending on the problem itself

Core Knowledge Theories

Some knowledge is so evolutionarily important that it is innate knowledge.

Domain-specific knowledge vs. Domain general

First refers to specialized facts or skills in an area whereas the second concerns that which is overall applicablke to many general areas

Nativism vs constructivism

First imagines that knowledge/ structures for aquiring knowledge are inherent (eg. chomsky) whereas second imagines that knowledge is built from experience (piaget and vygotsky)

Theory theory

theories become more complex with time

Sociocultural theories

enphasize importance of cultural learning

Vygotsky

Stressed imporance of interactions with others. In all societies adults teach cultural knowledge to children. Learning is collaborative.

Intersubjectivity

Mutual understanding of intentions. Turn taking, joint attention and social referencing

Scaffolding

Frameworks to support childs thinking. Clairification of goals and withdrawl of supports. Adults are better at this than children

Zone of proximal development-ZPD

teaching should be a bit beyond the childrens level but not by too much. Parents do this implicitly

Key parts to Vygotsky theory

Intersubjectivity

Scaffolding

Zone of proximal development

Move from private speech to inner speech

Dynamic Systems Approach

Babies stop stepping in water because their legs are to fat. Motor development is influenced by neural mechanisms. Effect if action on cognition

Infant dirrected speech

Almost all cultures use a diffeerent tone and repeat to hold infants attention.

perceptual narrowing

infants can differenciate all phonemes and then later in life lose phonemes not present in their language.

word segmentation

begins around 6 months. Pick up on words used in multiple sentences. pick up on stress, distributional properties and statistical learnin. Learn words attached to their name.

Babbling

6-10 months. Taking on sounds, inoation and qualities of language.

Intersubjectivity

not necissary but helps. Shared common understanding between people

Jerome Bruner

games and routines

pointing

9 months, indexically dirrecting to an object event or person.

Protodeclarative verses protoimperative

First is to share something one is loooking at or ask for its name, second is to point in order to get something or interact with it

Holophrases

Single word phrases

Teleographic speech

Multiword speech which limits use of gramatical in between words. Function words only.

Fast mapping

phenomon where an a word is immidetly understood with a meaning.

Quine’s Dilemma

how can kids know the referent

Syntactic bootstraping

children begin to understand words by the gramatical structure of the sentences they are in

Nurture theory of language development

Learned through reinforcement. Skinner

Nature theories of language development

language acquistition device. Chompsky

interactionist theory of language development

Everything about laguage development is influenced by its comunicative function. Language presented in structured situations. Kids are motiveted to intersubjectivity (communication with others). Domain general m,echanisms.

connectionist theories of lamnguage development

Statistical regularities in language allow us to learn without innate structures. Neural network models make same overregularization errors. Cant explain fast mapping. tools are within the anguage

learning theories

skinner. language learned through shaping reinforce sounds, then words, then sentences. parents dont puish incncorect constructions. responsivity encourages more talking

innate theories

compsky. To complex to be learned so it must be universal grammar. Language aqwuisition device for learning rules.

modularity hypothesis

brain comprised of innate modular sections capable of interpreting certain types of informatioon

Habituation recovery sequence

When a child has engaged with a stimulus long enough to become habituated then a change occurs allowing the initial stimulus to once again be salient

preferential looking

Research method wherein a researcher will show two different side by side images and mesure amount of time spent looking at each

visual preference

which of two vidual stimuli do infants look at more

habituation/dishabituation

said to occur when infants looking time decreases significantly as a result of repeated presentation of a stimulus. dishabituation is said to occur when looking time increases when a new stimulus is presented

violation of expectation

infants looking time will increase if they see sime event that violates what they expected to see.

intermodal perception

perception of sight and sound together from birth. infants look longer at a pacifier they have sucked on, video not sincronized with movement, speech not syncronized with facial movement

causality

present early- newborns search for source of sound.

blicket detector

device which activated when certain objects are placed on it. Asseses cause and effect

magical reasoning

childen under 3 don’t enjoy tricks as they interfere with causalo reasoning.

centration

Idea that children often focus on one specific componet of a thing rather than the wholistic veiw of it.

counting

requires understaing of one to one corespondance, stable order, cardinality, order irrelevance, abstraction

cardinality

last number of a set is how many are possesed

order irrelevance

start counting anywhere

abstraction

count everything

Reaction range

same genotype will develop differently in different environments